On January 27th, Secretary of Defense Leon E. Panetta announced that President Obama has nominated Lt. Gen. John F. Kelly, currently a senior military advisor to the secretary of defense, to be the next commander of U.S. Southern Command, commonly known as SOUTHCOM.
As the Miami Herald...
“It’s hard for us to do human rights work where we are. We have to hide what we are doing so they don’t watch us. Our comings and goings are monitored. Our emails are monitored. Our leaders are in a permanent state of stress, not just for themselves but for their children. It was hard for us to even get out to talk to you.”
This is what I heard from one activist when I visited Colombia on an international mission to investigate the status of human rights defenders this past December. Unfortunately, he was not alone in describing this systematic persecution and attacks against those...
The State Department yesterday released the first document outlining its foreign assistance request for 2013. Yesterday's "Executive Budget Summary" provides few details and lacks country-by-country totals for many programs.
Still, it allows us to provide a crude "snapshot" of how U.S. aid to the region looked in 2011, how it's looking this year, and what the Obama administration has in mind for next year.
Here is our best estimate of how U.S. military and police aid to Colombia, Mexico and...
Drug War News brings a complex story centering around a Zeta informer who emerged both as the reason behind the murder last year of American immigration agent Jaime Zapata and as the informer regarding the possible corruption of the three Tamaulipas governors. The story also reveals more about the growing cooperation between the U.S. and Mexican...
This chart, from a Colombian Defense Ministry document (PDF), shows Colombia's armed forces and police with a combined 452,475 members at the end of 2011, their highest number ever and 4 percent higher than 2010.
Contrast that to this...
Drug war news brings an investigative report from Newsweek on how U.S. government use of informers from the Sinaloa cartel may have unwittingly served its capo, 'El Chapo' Guzmán, in defeating his rivals. A report from a Ciudad Juarez hospital says that 80% of the children it serves suffer from post traumatic stress as a result...